Les Ateliers Ruby are celebrating the 90th anniversary of BMW Motorrad by launching a new range of 5 luxury motorcycle helmets as part of the “Munich 90 Collection”. The collection references the color scheme of legendary models which have helped BMW leave it’s undeniable mark on motor sports history.
Inspired by a recent episode of Roman Mars’ wonderful podcast 99% Invisible, I sought out a few images of WWI-era “dazzle” ship camouflage. Rather than blending a target with its surrounding colors and textures, dazzle (aka “razzle dazzle” or “dazzle painting”) deliberately caused ships to clash with the sea and sky, creating eye-aching shimmer effects and making it difficult to discern the craft’s direction, speed, and distance. The hope—and it was a hope, as dazzle inventor Norman Wilkinson’s theories were never properly proven—was that the bedazzle’d ships would so confuse enemy submarines that their torpedoes would never meet their mark. The nautical old guard, as one would expect, rejected Wilkinson’s sweetly cracked vision; the artists of the era’s burgeoning Cubist movement, however, were utterly delighted.
Posted by: Todd Goldstein | Instagram: @toddiangoldstein
Follow this great Tumblr: Postcards From Above, where “Google Maps Meets The World Of Vintage Postcards”.
For those of you looking to make this Monday go by a bit quicker. Browser Pong is a traditional Pong game played not in a browser window, but with browser windows. Designed by Stewdio, an art practice, code house, and graphic design studio based in London.
Tested and approved for Macintosh using the following browsers in order of preference: Safari 4, FireFox 3.6, Chrome 4, and Opera 10.
Marius Roosendaal from the Netherlands is making these cool typographic design studies on a daily basis and has formed a larger collection here. It’s worth checking out.
Via BtgLondon
Loving these little Kraft envelopes by Midori. I suddenly have the urge to organize everything into these things and put them in a filing cabinet, never to be seen again.
A Collection A Day is a blog by Lisa Congdon chronicling her daily obsession with assorted ephemera. I’ve always held onto little scraps and tokens like these, but none are as good as the stuff Congdon has on display. I often find this kind of stuff even more inspirational than straight-forward design, particularly the airline tags.
Source A Collection A Day via Grain Edit
I know this falls a little outside the normal scope of this blog but it’s Friday and this was too good to pass up. The Parrot ARDrone is being billed as the “First iPhone-Controlled Quadricopter Drone”. There’s no need to go much further than that for me, but add a camera to the helicopter and camera-view mode to the iPhone and I’m sold. The most amazing part of it all is the craft’s ability to right itself automatically using it’s built-in array of sensors (not to mention the potential for augmented reality applications given the manufacturer’s third-party development scheme) . It’s not out yet — the site says “coming in 2010” — and no word on pricing but I can’t imagine it will be very cheap. I think I’d be willing to splurge on something like this as long as it was cheaper than the iPhone itself. For more info check out this hands-on test of the ARDrone.
While the Quadricopter and it’s iPhone interfacing abilities are pretty incredible, I wish they had made an airplane version (although not sure the WiFi range would be sufficient for that), small R/C helicopters seem like they’re mostly for bothering dogs and tooling around your living room, not really as suited toward outdoor flight as the video suggests. When I worked at BKWLD with Dusty we got a couple of R/C planes and would fly them at lunch in the open spaces of Roseville. I loved those things, I don’t know why but R/C never seems to get old, I think I was about as excited every time I took that thing out as I was the first time I got an R/C car for Christmas. Since I moved to San Francisco I haven’t been using it; I think it’s in a closet somewhere. I bet the batteries are shot but I might get some new ones and take it for a spin at the park this weekend.
